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The loosing party claim that the election was stolen every 4 years.

eastbound 3y ago
Removing black-box voting would go great length at convincing people of the vote legitimacy in USA. I have been a vote counter in France, any citizen can keep an eye on his ballot in the transparent box until it’s counted. Carrying ballots into a secret room with no witness where they tell us “the machine” counts correctly, is exactly what Putin would have done.
- somenameforme 3y ago
  It's not just carrying ballots off into rooms for machine counting, but this happening days and even weeks after the election, with random arrivals of large numbers of ballots long after polls have closed. It's notable that people thinking an election is unfair, and an election being unfair, have the exact same social outcome. And so bending over backwards to absolutely ensure there's no reasonable doubt whatsoever is absolutely critical to a functioning democracy.
  - thephyber 3y ago
    > And so bending over backwards to absolutely ensure there's no reasonable doubt whatsoever There is no reasonable doubt. To the extent that any doubt remains, it is only in the mind of people who wouldn’t be swayed by facts. As someone who have spent the Trump years learning about epistemology (how we come to believe the things we do), I have realized that motivated reasoning will always blind humans to the truth. The truth is that elections require some amount of trust. It’s not possible to allow every voter the ability to see and verify each of the 162million ballots and no election would work if that was a requirement.
    - oleril 3y ago
      Bitcoin the most secure public ledger in the world proves that every participant in the blockchain can verify and see billion+ valid transactions. Trust in fully decentralized and transparent elections is not a technical issue!
      - thephyber 3y ago
        Lol, you again. The BTC ledger is pretty good, but it is fallible —- mostly because a human has to control the keys and the UI apps that make using the wallet for transactions are far less secure than the core BTC protocol. Good luck teaching a 90 year old person who hates computers how to vote using their BTC wallet. Also, the security of BTC isn’t infallible. Once someone finds a weakness in the system, they will quietly abuse it as a 0-day for a while before anyone notices it. Elections should be robust against any single point of failure, and they are. The BTC wallet is until it isn’t.
      - bcrl 3y ago
        Bitcoin sustains about 7 transactions per second. In 2022 there were roughly 168 million registered voters in the United States. It would take 24 million seconds to publish 1 transaction (vote) per voter using a bitcoin style blockchain. The math doesn't work. Bitcoin is not a solution to this problem.
        thephyber 3y ago
        Throughput isn’t fixed across all blockchain implementations. It’s possible to fork/side chain BTC to accommodate far more transactions per block, thus drastically increasing throughput. I still think _ergonomics_ of making sure every eligible voter can use the system is far more important that making it {immutable, distributed, transparent}. Also, the immutability property is a double edged sword as someone losing control of their wallet secret key would lead to a leak of everyone they voted for. Or worse yet, if voter ID is tied to wallet ID instead of government-issued ID, one organization could go around stealing private keys in order to steal those ballets.
    - somenameforme 3y ago
      Ballot verifiability is not impossible by any stretch of the imagination. A person fills out a ballot, that ballot is [optically] scanned and then automatically parsed a la scantron. Both the ballot and the resultant scan are published side by side. Optionally, add an ID on each ballot and people can not only look at all 162 million ballots, but even verify that their ballot properly scanned, published, and counted. The only argument against this is that ballot verifiability is a bad thing, because it might enable e.g. vote buying or whatever. Yet somehow people were perfectly fine with there being more than 26,000,000 votes made by mail in 2020 in which such threats are dramatically greater. The nice thing about this solution is also that there's no 'classified' data. The complete transparency of it all would make any sort of stuffing or vote manipulation effectively impossible, which means there's no need for ultra-sophisticated systems. Plain old 1990s tech of digital scanners and scantron would work just fine. Ballot observers would need to do little more than count the number of people coming into a station and ensure that matches the total number of ballots eventually published by that station. What's not to prefer about this relative to the status quo?
      - thephyber 3y ago
        Spoken like someone who has never actually looked at how an election works in a county in the USA, doesn’t care about the actual legal requirements, seems to ignore all concerns for accessibility (eg. Scantrons are terrible for old people with bad/no eyesight, have motor control issues with hands, etc), doesn’t know what scantrons actually did with the scan results, hasn’t thought through the complexity of ID in the USA (we don’t have a single ID number and the alternative is to store photo ID cards for everyone to see and collect) and doesn’t have a plan for absentee voters or military deployed voters. And that doesn’t even address any of the human factors (eg. people lose their ID, they lose their ballot, ballots get crumpled by voters and stuck in the scanners, electricity isn’t up 99.999% of the time, etc). Elections are hard for a reason — the requirements are complex. Everyone wants 160million+ votes to be collected, counted, and results published by 9p on election day. Everyone wants the registry to work perfectly and wants the convenience of not having to travel far to a polling place. In practice, these create a huge number of hurdles that election officials must navigate, plan for contingencies (eg. the hurricane immediately before the election in Florida 2022). Maybe my best advice to you is the snide “don’t reinvent the wheel in Hacker News comments, but rather get involved as a polling place volunteer next year, then see all of the edge cases in action”. Then don’t propose your MVP v2 to me, propose it to your county election board. Only you will be ignored because elections in the US have 250 years of learning from the previous errors, but you seem quite content to ignore all of those hard-earned lessons.
- thephyber 3y ago
  > Carrying ballots into a secret room with no witness where they tell us “the machine” counts correctly Quit spreading lies. US law allows all vote tallying to be inspected by a limited number of observers, including at least one from each candidate/party on the ballot. Elections in the US are run by each of the 3300+ counties, many of which use pure paper ballots and tallying, still. The more populated counties have a much larger logistics challenge, so they tend to be the ones that use tallying machines. But they don’t trust those machines anymore than you do - so they also do audits using random sampling to verify that the tallying machines exactly match hand-tallying results.
tjpnz 3y ago
I assume you mean the losing party. As a longtime watcher of US politics I don't recall a situation where it's been this extreme. Even in 2000 where the complaints were about the electoral college system as opposed to outright fraud.
- thephyber 3y ago
  > I don't recall a situation where it's been this extreme There was no outright fraud. There has been a massive amount of time, money, investigation, and litigation that all points in the same direction. So why do so many people believe there was election fraud in 2020? There are too many people with financial incentives to make people outraged now: - Social media platforms, - new media companies, - hybrid entertainment-journalism companies, - fake media companies, - wealthy idiots dipping into politics (Patrick Byrne, Mike Liddell, Ginny Thomas, etc), - campaigns raising huge money on "stop the steal" claims (Donny Trump, Kari Lake) - a cottage industry of charlatan lawyers litigating "Stop The Steal" without any evidence (Rudy Giuliani, Sydney Powell, Lin Wood) I don't think it's a stretch to say that these people don't care about the truth. They are in it for the power and/or money. And after the 2008 SCOTUS decision that unleashed unlimited money in politics, elections have become the cheaper alternative to having to compete in the marketplace. Also worth pointing out that Trump re-engaged many voters who were disillusioned by politics before him (and thus, completely ignorant about policies). He turned political rallies into WWE wrasslin' shows -- I with I could unread all of the articles which mentioned "heel" and "kayfabe". Sadly the target audience of WWE isn't exactly media literate and probably can't tell the differences between fact, opinion, hyperbole, and completely fabricated gossip.
jim-jim-jim 3y ago
They're seething and downvoting, but 2000 → Florida 2004 → Whatever the "don't taze me bro" guy claimed 2008 → All sorts of crazy Tea Party shit 2012 → ??? (Nobody actually liked Romney) 2016 → Russia 2020 → Whatever Trump claimed
- thuridas 3y ago
  Note that Russia was accused of influencing elections rather than hacking the voting itself. That is: - Providing money for campaign - Using data from Cambridge analítica with target voters. - Hacking democrats trying to get advantage / dark secrets. This broke several privacy issues and campaign finance laws but as far as I remember not the voting machines themselves. That said. Voting with paper makes everybody more confident of the result.
- drewcoo 3y ago
  Bernie's ideas were wildly popular in 2016, some of them across party lines. The DNC's superdelegate (rigging) system meant that he wouldn't get the ticket and even though he would win every county in West Virginia, he somehow lost West Virginia. Instead the DNC selected a candidate intensely disliked by a large portion of the population. So unpopular that she was bested by a game show host. Basically, the DNC overrode the people's will and threw the election. Hillary had to blame something and it certainly wasn't going to be herself or her party. Maybe the reason was: - Russia - Americans who had voted for Obama suddenly turned into deplorable, low-information bigots - sexism - too much bad press about things like her emails - Wikileaks - Bernie was too mean - Comey etc. Oh, and her base, not understanding error bars, went on a statistician witch hunt.
  - krapp 3y ago
    Hillary Clinton got millions more votes than the talk show host - more votes than any losing candidate in history - and the margin between them was split almost exactly 50/50. The narrative that she lost because she was "intensely disliked" or unpopular (except among the right, who were never going to vote for her anyway) is simply incorrect. >too much bad press about things like her emails. >Comey Wikileaks and Comey reopening the email inquiry did obvious damage to her campaign, I don't know why you would imply that's not a legitimate complaint on her part. You could say she didn't do damage control well enough, sure, but there's a reason the only thing anyone remembers about her campaign comes from conspiracy theories about her emails and the DNC hack, and nothing to do with her actual platform. >Americans who had voted for Obama suddenly turned into deplorable, low-information bigots What? She said that about a subset of Trump voters who would never vote for Obama. And time has proven her correct.

Removing black-box voting would go great length at convincing people of the vote legitimacy in USA. I have been a vote counter in France, any citizen can keep an eye on his ballot in the transparent box until it’s counted. Carrying ballots into a secret room with no witness where they tell us “the machine” counts correctly, is exactly what Putin would have done.

somenameforme 3y ago
It's not just carrying ballots off into rooms for machine counting, but this happening days and even weeks after the election, with random arrivals of large numbers of ballots long after polls have closed. It's notable that people thinking an election is unfair, and an election being unfair, have the exact same social outcome. And so bending over backwards to absolutely ensure there's no reasonable doubt whatsoever is absolutely critical to a functioning democracy.
- thephyber 3y ago
  > And so bending over backwards to absolutely ensure there's no reasonable doubt whatsoever There is no reasonable doubt. To the extent that any doubt remains, it is only in the mind of people who wouldn’t be swayed by facts. As someone who have spent the Trump years learning about epistemology (how we come to believe the things we do), I have realized that motivated reasoning will always blind humans to the truth. The truth is that elections require some amount of trust. It’s not possible to allow every voter the ability to see and verify each of the 162million ballots and no election would work if that was a requirement.
  - oleril 3y ago
    Bitcoin the most secure public ledger in the world proves that every participant in the blockchain can verify and see billion+ valid transactions. Trust in fully decentralized and transparent elections is not a technical issue!
    - thephyber 3y ago
      Lol, you again. The BTC ledger is pretty good, but it is fallible —- mostly because a human has to control the keys and the UI apps that make using the wallet for transactions are far less secure than the core BTC protocol. Good luck teaching a 90 year old person who hates computers how to vote using their BTC wallet. Also, the security of BTC isn’t infallible. Once someone finds a weakness in the system, they will quietly abuse it as a 0-day for a while before anyone notices it. Elections should be robust against any single point of failure, and they are. The BTC wallet is until it isn’t.
    - bcrl 3y ago
      Bitcoin sustains about 7 transactions per second. In 2022 there were roughly 168 million registered voters in the United States. It would take 24 million seconds to publish 1 transaction (vote) per voter using a bitcoin style blockchain. The math doesn't work. Bitcoin is not a solution to this problem.
      - thephyber 3y ago
        Throughput isn’t fixed across all blockchain implementations. It’s possible to fork/side chain BTC to accommodate far more transactions per block, thus drastically increasing throughput. I still think _ergonomics_ of making sure every eligible voter can use the system is far more important that making it {immutable, distributed, transparent}. Also, the immutability property is a double edged sword as someone losing control of their wallet secret key would lead to a leak of everyone they voted for. Or worse yet, if voter ID is tied to wallet ID instead of government-issued ID, one organization could go around stealing private keys in order to steal those ballets.
  - somenameforme 3y ago
    Ballot verifiability is not impossible by any stretch of the imagination. A person fills out a ballot, that ballot is [optically] scanned and then automatically parsed a la scantron. Both the ballot and the resultant scan are published side by side. Optionally, add an ID on each ballot and people can not only look at all 162 million ballots, but even verify that their ballot properly scanned, published, and counted. The only argument against this is that ballot verifiability is a bad thing, because it might enable e.g. vote buying or whatever. Yet somehow people were perfectly fine with there being more than 26,000,000 votes made by mail in 2020 in which such threats are dramatically greater. The nice thing about this solution is also that there's no 'classified' data. The complete transparency of it all would make any sort of stuffing or vote manipulation effectively impossible, which means there's no need for ultra-sophisticated systems. Plain old 1990s tech of digital scanners and scantron would work just fine. Ballot observers would need to do little more than count the number of people coming into a station and ensure that matches the total number of ballots eventually published by that station. What's not to prefer about this relative to the status quo?
    - thephyber 3y ago
      Spoken like someone who has never actually looked at how an election works in a county in the USA, doesn’t care about the actual legal requirements, seems to ignore all concerns for accessibility (eg. Scantrons are terrible for old people with bad/no eyesight, have motor control issues with hands, etc), doesn’t know what scantrons actually did with the scan results, hasn’t thought through the complexity of ID in the USA (we don’t have a single ID number and the alternative is to store photo ID cards for everyone to see and collect) and doesn’t have a plan for absentee voters or military deployed voters. And that doesn’t even address any of the human factors (eg. people lose their ID, they lose their ballot, ballots get crumpled by voters and stuck in the scanners, electricity isn’t up 99.999% of the time, etc). Elections are hard for a reason — the requirements are complex. Everyone wants 160million+ votes to be collected, counted, and results published by 9p on election day. Everyone wants the registry to work perfectly and wants the convenience of not having to travel far to a polling place. In practice, these create a huge number of hurdles that election officials must navigate, plan for contingencies (eg. the hurricane immediately before the election in Florida 2022). Maybe my best advice to you is the snide “don’t reinvent the wheel in Hacker News comments, but rather get involved as a polling place volunteer next year, then see all of the edge cases in action”. Then don’t propose your MVP v2 to me, propose it to your county election board. Only you will be ignored because elections in the US have 250 years of learning from the previous errors, but you seem quite content to ignore all of those hard-earned lessons.
thephyber 3y ago
> Carrying ballots into a secret room with no witness where they tell us “the machine” counts correctly Quit spreading lies. US law allows all vote tallying to be inspected by a limited number of observers, including at least one from each candidate/party on the ballot. Elections in the US are run by each of the 3300+ counties, many of which use pure paper ballots and tallying, still. The more populated counties have a much larger logistics challenge, so they tend to be the ones that use tallying machines. But they don’t trust those machines anymore than you do - so they also do audits using random sampling to verify that the tallying machines exactly match hand-tallying results.

tjpnz 3y ago

I assume you mean the losing party. As a longtime watcher of US politics I don't recall a situation where it's been this extreme. Even in 2000 where the complaints were about the electoral college system as opposed to outright fraud.

thephyber 3y ago
> I don't recall a situation where it's been this extreme There was no outright fraud. There has been a massive amount of time, money, investigation, and litigation that all points in the same direction. So why do so many people believe there was election fraud in 2020? There are too many people with financial incentives to make people outraged now: - Social media platforms, - new media companies, - hybrid entertainment-journalism companies, - fake media companies, - wealthy idiots dipping into politics (Patrick Byrne, Mike Liddell, Ginny Thomas, etc), - campaigns raising huge money on "stop the steal" claims (Donny Trump, Kari Lake) - a cottage industry of charlatan lawyers litigating "Stop The Steal" without any evidence (Rudy Giuliani, Sydney Powell, Lin Wood) I don't think it's a stretch to say that these people don't care about the truth. They are in it for the power and/or money. And after the 2008 SCOTUS decision that unleashed unlimited money in politics, elections have become the cheaper alternative to having to compete in the marketplace. Also worth pointing out that Trump re-engaged many voters who were disillusioned by politics before him (and thus, completely ignorant about policies). He turned political rallies into WWE wrasslin' shows -- I with I could unread all of the articles which mentioned "heel" and "kayfabe". Sadly the target audience of WWE isn't exactly media literate and probably can't tell the differences between fact, opinion, hyperbole, and completely fabricated gossip.

jim-jim-jim 3y ago

They're seething and downvoting, but 2000 → Florida 2004 → Whatever the "don't taze me bro" guy claimed 2008 → All sorts of crazy Tea Party shit 2012 → ??? (Nobody actually liked Romney) 2016 → Russia 2020 → Whatever Trump claimed

thuridas 3y ago
Note that Russia was accused of influencing elections rather than hacking the voting itself. That is: - Providing money for campaign - Using data from Cambridge analítica with target voters. - Hacking democrats trying to get advantage / dark secrets. This broke several privacy issues and campaign finance laws but as far as I remember not the voting machines themselves. That said. Voting with paper makes everybody more confident of the result.
drewcoo 3y ago
Bernie's ideas were wildly popular in 2016, some of them across party lines. The DNC's superdelegate (rigging) system meant that he wouldn't get the ticket and even though he would win every county in West Virginia, he somehow lost West Virginia. Instead the DNC selected a candidate intensely disliked by a large portion of the population. So unpopular that she was bested by a game show host. Basically, the DNC overrode the people's will and threw the election. Hillary had to blame something and it certainly wasn't going to be herself or her party. Maybe the reason was: - Russia - Americans who had voted for Obama suddenly turned into deplorable, low-information bigots - sexism - too much bad press about things like her emails - Wikileaks - Bernie was too mean - Comey etc. Oh, and her base, not understanding error bars, went on a statistician witch hunt.
- krapp 3y ago
  Hillary Clinton got millions more votes than the talk show host - more votes than any losing candidate in history - and the margin between them was split almost exactly 50/50. The narrative that she lost because she was "intensely disliked" or unpopular (except among the right, who were never going to vote for her anyway) is simply incorrect. >too much bad press about things like her emails. >Comey Wikileaks and Comey reopening the email inquiry did obvious damage to her campaign, I don't know why you would imply that's not a legitimate complaint on her part. You could say she didn't do damage control well enough, sure, but there's a reason the only thing anyone remembers about her campaign comes from conspiracy theories about her emails and the DNC hack, and nothing to do with her actual platform. >Americans who had voted for Obama suddenly turned into deplorable, low-information bigots What? She said that about a subset of Trump voters who would never vote for Obama. And time has proven her correct.